Even as she opened the door to Harley’s cell block of the prison, Emilia still didn’t know if what she was doing was going to end well or not. It’d been a long day already; maybe she should have just cut her losses and gone home. But when she’d gotten into her car, there had been that nagging feeling at the back of her mind, a relentless clawing sensation that wouldn’t let up. So back to Belle Reeve she went.

Harley’s back was to her. She didn’t turn around at the sound of the door opening. That in and of itself wasn’t particularly strange. What Emilia couldn’t help but to notice as the door slid and clanged shut behind her was the silence. Harley was always humming or singing, or just talking. To herself, at least. But there was nothing. It was silent, the emptiest that the block had felt since Harley began staying there...again.

It was the fastest turnaround that Emilia could remember in recent history. DuBois had secured everyone’s freedom when they were in Corto Maltese. That was a minor miracle by ARGUS standards, but he’d managed it. Everyone had been able to take the win and their freedom and carry along on their way.

Not Harley.

For the record, she had been ready to do that, although begrudgingly. Even with what had happened to Rick, she had been ready to try and move forward because something good had to come out of all of it, right? She’d been released from Belle Reeve for less than twenty-four hours when she had caught wind of a rumor that Peacemaker was still alive. That Waller was keeping him alive.

So, she did what any good friend would do when they came into information like that: She found out what hospital they were keeping him in and tried to kill him.

They wasted no time throwing her right back into the cell that she had just gotten released from. At the time she had been so blinded by anger that the consequences of what she was doing didn’t cross her mind. She was just mad, and hurt, and grieving. She hadn’t cared at all about being thrown back into prison until she heard some of the guards talking a few days later about Rick’s funeral. Then a second wave of messy emotions came crashing down over her. She’d been wallowing in those feelings until, well, she still was.

Emilia cleared her throat, not even trying to use the gesture to get Harley’s attention, but when she went to speak she realized just how rusty her vocal cords felt. She hadn’t said much for most of the day—what was there for her to say that others wouldn’t say first? Or that wouldn’t earn her strange looks? No. Other than exchanging a few quiet words with the General, she’d kept her mouth shut.

Harley didn’t know any of that, though. So her response was about what anyone would have expected it to be even on a better day. There was no getting the emotional waver out of her voice, but there was still plenty of venom left in it too. “Fuck off,” she snapped, back still to the door.

Harcourt sighed, but it was more out of exhaustion than genuine frustration. Taking another step closer to Harley’s cell door, she said, “It’s me.”

Two small words got Harley to turn around and look at who had come to see her. Her narrowed eyes widened just a touch when she saw who it was. “Oh, it’s you.” Harley took a moment to turn around so that she was facing Emilia completely, something that clearly sparked a little bit of hope as she took another step closer. Harley looked her dead in the eyes. “Fuck off.”

The deep breath that Harcourt pulled in as she fought to roll her eyes was her last ditch effort to not let this turn into the fight that she would undoubtedly go out looking for later. She didn’t want to fight Harley. It would be a huge mess, for one thing. But for another, she felt like maybe the woman on the other side of the iron bars was one of the few people that might actually understand what she was going through. At least, that’s what she was hoping. And she didn’t have hope about very many things these days.

As she put herself mere inches away from the bars, Harcourt also realized that she was so bad at this. The whole consoling, talking about your feelings, crying in front of people thing. She was bad at it. She never did it. What a hell of a day to try and start.

“I just came to...check and see how you’re doing.”

Harley scoffed, but the tears in her eyes were undeniable. If they allowed her to wear makeup in her cell, Emilia had a feeling it would’ve been streaked and smeared all over her face. “I’m fantastic. Thanks for asking.”

“Har—”

“What the fuck do you want?”

Emilia paused. She was just going to have to be honest. She was going to have to give Harley at least that much if she wanted to leave here not feeling like an even bigger piece of shit than she already did. It was bad enough that she had to stand across the casket from June at the cemetery and stuff her guilt down. She had to do some kind of penance.

“I’m sorry,” she finally forced out, the words leaving behind a foreign residue on her tongue. “About, fucking everything...but especially about today.”

Anger flashed across Harley’s face but then her lips dropped into the deepest frown Harcourt had ever seen. Tears ran down her cheeks and fresh ones welled in her eyes immediately after. Harley didn’t even bother wiping them away. It’s not like it would matter.

As she gnawed on the apology, she noticed what Harcourt was wearing. Black was always her go-to color. But she wasn’t dressed the way that she usually was. She had on her black boots like always, but the black pants she was wearing were sleeker than her usual jeans, and the black blouse had sleeves that snaked all the way down to her wrists. Her hair was done, but she wasn’t wearing any makeup. Inside Belle Reeve or out, today was a rough day for everyone.

“It’s fucked up!”

Emilia nodded. “It is.”

“I should’ve been there!” Harley got up off her prison-issued cot and started to pace along the length of her cell. She was shaking her head, lips moving but she wasn’t saying anything out loud.

Harley hated funerals. Always had. And yeah, sure, no one really likes funerals. But they’d always made her stomach feel heavy and made her skin crawl. Before all this, she would always sneak in and out of them as fast as she could. She’d offer her condolences to whatever family members she knew and then she’d scram. But she’d still go. She was at least still able to go. Over the years she had gotten used to not being ‘allowed’ to go places and do certain things. But this was new. It was new and it was salt in an already festering wound.

She stopped her pacing and stared at Emilia through the bars. “Why wouldn’t they let me go?”

It was more of a rhetorical question than anything else. But the hurt in her eyes still made Emilia want to give her an answer. She was trying to come up with one that was better than simply saying, “You know why.” Instead she settled for a different truth, an oversimplifying one. “Waller’s an asshole—she was never gonna let you go.”

Then her hands were gripping the bars, her face pressed to the gap between them. Sadness and rage both swirled around in her bright blue eyes. “Peacemaker killed him and is out there walking free and yet they won’t even let me go to my friend’s funeral?!”

Her exhale shook as she let it out. Something about hearing Harley refer to Rick as her friend. It was as painful as it was reassuring. Over the years of watching Rick and the rest of Task Force X run ops from her end of the surveillance screen, Harcourt always wondered if anyone out there really had his back the way that they should. Harley did. It seemed that way most of the time, but there was no reason for her to lie about her motives now. There was nothing for her to get out of pretending.

“I didn’t know that you’d requested to go until I got there,” Harcourt admitted. Not that she believed that she could’ve changed Waller’s mind if she knew ahead of time. But maybe it could’ve changed something, anything.

She pointed angrily to the door that Harcourt had entered through. “They owed me that!”

She nodded in agreement without hesitation, which surprised her. Up until now, Emilia hadn’t really thought that anyone inside Belle Reeve was owed much of anything. The exchanges made through Task Force X were fair enough, but even that wasn’t owed. But Harley was right. They owed her this one simple thing and they didn’t give it to her.

“There were a shit-ton of people there,” Emilia said, shaking her head as she thought back on the sea of faces. “Lot of military guys.”

Harley scoffed. “’Course.”

Something about that made Emilia smile. Looking down at the toes of her boots, she asked, “You ever meet Rick’s dad?”

Harley shook her head. “No. Flag never really talked about him much.” She waited for Emilia to look at her. “What’s he like?”

Emilia chuckled. “I can see where Rick got just about everything but his height.”

She smiled despite the tears that were keeping her eyes glassy. “Yeah?”

Her voice softened as she nodded, sadness creeping into her tone again. “Yeah.”

Silence lingered between them, but it was comfortable. There were barriers between them but they still managed to share the heavy weight of their grief with each other. Emilia felt more at ease standing on the other side of the bars from Harley than she had standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the people who had been at the funeral. Funny how that worked. She wondered if Rick had started to feel that way about Harley after a while, about all of his frequent fliers with Task Force X. It was a different kind of camaraderie.

“Everything is so fucked,” Harley said after a long minute of heavy silence.

Emilia was nodding before Harley even got around to explaining what exactly constituted everything. “Yeah, it is.”

“Flag didn’t deserve any of that.”

Emilia pressed her lips into a thin line, desperate not to let her feelings shine through. She could only afford so much vulnerability. All of what was happening already pushed against the walls and boundaries that she had built up over the years.

If Harley noticed the internal battles that Emilia was fighting on the other side of the bars, she didn’t say anything about it. Rather than resuming her pacing, Harley melted down into a puddle on the floor. She managed to arrange herself so that she was sitting cross-legged, elbows digging into her thighs just above her knees to allow her head to drop into her hands. Emilia watched as she ran her fingers back through her hair, nails raking against her scalp before she shook her head once more.

“They didn’t even care about him!” Harley snapped.

Emilia frowned. “Who?”

The short laugh that she let out was a bitter one. “Hah. Who? Any of ‘em.” She made a vague gesture towards the exit. “Army. ARGUS. Whoever.”

She knew that Harley wasn’t speaking about her specifically, but Emilia still felt a pang of defensiveness go through her. “People cared about him, Harley,” she said, trying not to let her feelings seep out through her words. “People still do.”

She scoffed. “Yeah. Okay.”

Her hands tightened into fists by her sides. “You’re not the only one—”

“If they cared so much,” she hopped back up to her feet, her anger propelling her upwards, “then why the fuck is Peacemaker out there, huh? He’s out there, and I’m,” she slammed her palms against the bars in front of her, “stuck in here!”

Emilia knew exactly why Peacemaker was out there and Harley was stuck back in the cell that she had finally vacated just a short while before. But the question was a rhetorical one. Even if it wasn’t, knowing the real answer wasn’t going to make Harley feel any better. If anything all it was going to do was make her more upset. That burden was one that Emilia decided she was better off carrying on her own. That didn’t need to be yet another thing that the two of them had in common.

“I know,” she said finally, knowing that she had to say something or Harley was going to revert back to her initial conversation killer of ‘Fuck off’.

“I thought that there weren’t any more ways for them to piss me off.” She sniffled, haphazardly wiping at the tears on her face. “Should’a known better.”

“He was my friend too,” Emilia said. As soon as the words came out she knew that it wasn’t the segue that she was looking for, and she started mentally kicking herself for it before the last syllable had died in the air.

Harley leaned against the bars, metal pressing against her forehead. A tiny smile began to lift the edges of her mouth. “Thought you didn’t have any friends?”

It was a joke, one that wasn’t as harsh as it could’ve been. It managed to get a fleeting smile out of Harcourt, too. “Didn’t use to.” She paused, sadness beginning to weigh on her features again as reality settled over her. “Guess I don’t anymore, either.”

Harley frowned. “I know the feeling.”

If only things with them were different. If only they were different people. It could have been the perfect opening for a new friendship. Acquaintanceship at least. But Emilia was in no mood to let anyone get close to her again, and Harley knew better than to get comfortable with anyone who hadn’t spent any time on her side of the bars in Belle Reeve. The only reason that she and Rick had gotten so close is because they were constantly almost dying together. Saving each other tends to build the trust.

“Rick left behind a real fucking mess, huh?” Emilia said.

Harley could hear the joke hiding underneath the sadness in her voice. She managed a choked laugh. “Yeah. He did.”

Emilia found herself staring down at a random spot on the far wall behind Harley as she said, “I’m sorry that they didn’t let you go.”

She sighed. “Me too. Least there was one person there who actually gave a fuck about him, though.”

Emilia gave a split-second half smile, and a nod. Verbalizing a thanks felt like it would undermine the moment. Instead she said, “I know you wanted to go. And you should’ve been able to. But honestly…it was a lot. Army guys, agents…then his family and June.”

“Lotta people and only one Rick.”

Harcourt nodded. “Exactly.”

There was a long pause, she thought about the realities of the funeral and Harley tried to conjure up a million different ways she thought that it might have gone. It would’ve been a fine time to turn on her heel and head back home. There was nothing more that either of them could do for each other—the deeper that she got into the conversation with Harley the more that she realized that. But she couldn’t bring herself to walk away just yet. It wasn’t like there was anyone else that she felt like she could reach out to and call to talk to about all of this.

“Did you know that his dad calls him Ricky?”

For the first time since Emilia saw them dragging her back into Belle Reeve, Harley’s eyes lit up. She laughed, emotional but not as heavy as it had been before. “What?”

Emilia chuckled and nodded. “Yeah. I fought the urge to say the same thing when I heard his dad call him that.”

“Ricky,” Harley repeated in amused disbelief. “Wow. And to think that I wasted all those years calling him Flag.”

“I don’t think he ever would’ve heard the end of it if the rest of the team found out.”

She shook her head. “’Course not. That’s what would’a been so great about it.” She hummed in amusement, and once it grew quiet between them again, Harley asked, “You really just come here to see me?”

Emilia rolled her eyes out of reflex. “Don’t make me say it.”

“What? Think it’s gonna kill ya?”

She shook her head, more in admonishment than disagreement. But Harley wasn’t backing down, and the more Harcourt thought about it, the more she realized that even if Harley said anything to anyone, it’s not as though there was going to be any people here who would believe her.

“Like I said, the funeral was just, a lot.” She crossed her arms over her chest. “And like you said…there were a lot of people there who…I just don’t think they knew the same Rick I—we—did.”

Harley was leaning against the bars again. One hand wrapped around each, not with the intensity that she had before. It was keeping her upright now, rather than before when it had just felt like another barrier that she couldn’t get through, another barrier separating her from Rick’s funeral.

“Who’d’a thought?” Harley said.

Emilia shook her head. “Not me.”

“What’s gonna happen now?”

She tilted her head slightly. “What do you mean?”

“With, you know, with Peacemaker? The Suicide Squad?” The “What’s gonna happen with me?” went unspoken but Harley knew Emilia heard it anyway.

“I…I don’t really know.”

“That’s your way of sayin’ it’s nothin’ that I’m gonna like, isn’t it?”

She didn’t have any energy to lie, so she nodded.

Harley sighed, knowing that dramatically flopping onto her bed or the floor wasn’t going to do anything to fix the situation. She tapped her forehead against the bar, trying to think of what to do or say next. It wasn’t like she had much at her disposal.

Shutting her eyes, Harley said, “Well. Thanks for stopping in.”

“Sorry it wasn’t with better news.” Emilia surprised herself at how genuine the apology was.

Harley shrugged. “I’m used to bad news at this point. ‘Sides,” she went and sat down on the end of her bed closest to Emilia, “wasn’t al bad news.” She saw the questioning look on Harcourt’s face and smiled. “Gonna spend a long time tryna picture big, bad Colonel Flag responding to Ricky.”

Emilia chuckled. “Right.”

She wanted to get over herself enough to say something more, something that mattered. But she just didn’t have it in her. The day, the last few weeks, had just been too exhausting for any of that. Honesty and openness didn’t suit her, never had.

Harley was laying down staring up at the ceiling as she spoke. Emilia briefly wondered if she even meant for her to hear as she said, “I’m gonna figure somethin’ out. Believe me.”

Emilia didn’t say anything, but she certainly believed it. Whether Harley meant she was going to figure out how to get back out of Belle Reeve, or figure out how to deal with Peacemaker, Emilia wasn’t sure. Maybe a little bit of both. Either way, if anyone could figure it out it was probably Harley. The part of Emilia that was still bleeding and bruised wanted her to figure it out. The part of her who knew that there were much larger forces at play than either of them wasn’t so sure.

She was backpedaling towards the door. “I gotta go. But, uh, thanks. And…and sorry.”

Harley propped herself up on her elbows. “See ya, Hardcore.”

Emilia rolled her eyes but didn’t correct her as she turned and left. As the locked door slid shut behind her once more, she had to admit that she felt a little better, a little less alone. It didn’t really fix anything, but it was something.